The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing of traumas so that we don’t pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.

+SIEGEL – EMOTIONS AND A SENSE OF TIME

Notes on time

“Primary emotions are expressed in a unique manner in the moment, just as an individual’s state of mind at a particular time is a one-of-a-kind state. The flow of states moves forward in time and never repeats itself. “ (siegel/tdm/129)

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“The term “mood” refers to the general tone of emotions across time.”

Siegel/tdm/130 (more info on mood on this page)

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“Emotion also reflects the essential way in which the mind emerges from the interface between neurophysiological processes and interpersonal relationships: It serves as a set of integrating processes linking various systems in a dynamic flow across domains and through time. Siegel/tdm/131)” also put in EMOTION NOTES & BRAIN NOTES but with more of the paragraph included

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siegel/tdm/134-135 (part of the long quote found in BRAIN NOTES and EMOTION NOTES)

“What exactly it means for neural activation profiles to become “linked” is a central concern for scientists of the brain and mind. How do simultaneously activated processes bind together to form a continuity of experience?

(me: what if they don’t, and you get “simultaneous time?”) One approach to trying to answer this binding question comes from studies of the waves of electrical activity sweeping across the brain on a regular basis. A forty-cycle-per-second (“forty-hertz” or “40-Hz”) pattern has been noted, in which the brain becomes active from back to front. This activity occurs in both halves of the brain and has been identified as a “thalamocortical” sweep, going from the deeper areas such as the thalamus up toward the higher cortical regions. One view is that representational processes (the neural net profiles activated at a particular moment in time) that are “on” at the time of the sweep are bound together as one seemingly continuous flow of conscious experience. This view allows us to see how the phenomenon of consciousness creates a sense of continuity out of what is really a set of quite discontinuous representational processes, such as sights, sounds, thoughts, bodily states, and self-reflections. This “40-Hz” view also gives us insight into how the lateral prefrontal cortex may become “linked: to particular set of representations – those that are active during the sweep. The attentional focus of working memory can select from those representations the limited number it may be able to handle at any one (tdm/134) time. Because of the nature of the sweeping, each hemisphere can functin quite independently of the other. There are probably left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere forms of consciousness that are quite distinct from each other, based on the unique nature of the representational processes of each hemisphere….(135)”

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from siegel/tdm/137

“As the activations within the brain change, energy flows through the system. Changes in the state of the system are changes in this flow of energy. Many factors in addition to appraisal influence what determines how the system’s state changes over time. (copy to TIME NOTES) These determining factors include present input from the external world or from other components of the body, as well as constraints established from prior experience (such as Hebbian connections) and present appraisals.”